"If this proves impracticable, he will have to wait until the winter of 1902-1903, and take the remains overland by sledges to Irkutsk. It would be impossible to make this tremendous journey in summer, through a roadless country, where there are thousands of square miles of swamps. "Numerous relics of mammoths have been discovered in Siberia, including pieces of skin, and all the bones. On more than one occasion a complete animal has been found preserved in the ice, but a complete animal has never been secured in its entirety and brought back to civilization. That is exactly what the Imperial Academy of Sciences now proposes to do. According to the last report from Irkutsk, it is in a fair way to accomplish this. "It is, perhaps, one of the most marvellous facts in the whole realm of nature that the body of a mammoth should be preserved exactly as it existed in life thousands and thousands of years ago, but there is every reason to believe that this happened in countless cases. "The mammoth was a gigantic species of extinct elephant. It flourished in past geological ages, and also survived into the days of early man. When the Palaeolithic or Old Stone man flourished on earth two hundred thousand years ago, the mammoth was as common as the horse to-day. In no part of the world were mammoths more abundant than in Northern Siberia. They must have roamed about there as freely as the buffalo did in North America fifty years ago. "Though similar in structure to the modern elephant, the mammoth was very different in habits. He was a northern animal, and with this in view was provided with a very long, thick hair, reddish in color, like that of the camel. He had extraordinary teeth and stomach, so that he was able to masticate and digest, not only plants, leaves and so forth, but wood and the trunks of trees. His stomach has been found full of young fir trees. His teeth were built in layers and renewed themselves ceaselessly through life. "Sometimes the mammoth would become mired in a soft spot of earth, and there sink in, die, become frozen and preserved forever. Another mammoth, while walking across a glacier, would fall into a crevasse, and there become frozen in a gigantic block of ice. That is what happened in the case of the animal recently discovered in Siberia. The soil is generally frozen to a depth of four hundred feet in Northern Siberia. "There were many species of mammoths, some of them existing in earlier ages than others. One species was provided with four tusks, the upper ones turning up as in the present elephant, and the lower turning down, as in the walrus. These horns were of gigantic size, in some cases measuring twelve feet long. They were adapted principally to digging up and pulling down trees. The mastodon was a giant elephant of a still earlier period than the mammoth.